Davenport

A peculiar collection of men catches the driver’s eye as he’s gassing up at “Lil Billy’s Gas n Go”. They’re huddled across the street, guarding the walkway leading up to the bus depot. It’s the type of gathering that one can tell is a permanent fixture to the otherwise desolate streetscape, even if none of its individual members stay for more than a few hours at most. They wear a nearly uniform drab. Everything is washed in the same colorless languor: coats, skin, hair, and the stench of despondency that comes from people desperate to get anywhere, but with no place to actually go.

Their faces, too, are ashen. The driver spies a few dirty cheeks and foreheads peering out of caps as the men battle, and fail, to cover every inch from the cold. The most remarkable thing is that they don’t seem to be of any particular race. The driver assumes they’re white, merely because the rest of the state –and entire middle of the country, outside of major cities, really- is as well. Yet there’s something about the way they can’t seem to stand up straight and only communicate –on the rare occasions they do- with grunts and nods that points to the future mongrelization that so many politicians fear will result from the mixing of America’s various races and ethnicities, including whites. The driver does not consider himself to be a racist -after all, who but the most extreme of racists proudly declares themselves as such? But there’s something about the group -really a single entity with a few variations on the same indistinct head, and pairs of insect-like limbs rubbing together to stay warm- that makes the driver want to lose every morsel he’s eaten in the past twenty-four hours. It could be the combination with the gasoline fumes too, though that’s a smell he usually relishes. It’s the way the bundled limbs occasionally break away from each other and stick out into the road, whenever the rare car sloshes by. Hitchhikers! The driver runs over with the nozzle still pumping into the car.

The group registers the stranger sprinting to their perimeter. They don’t budge, but merely flaunt their disregard with studied indifference. There’s more important things to tend to, like staying warm or flagging down a ride. The driver has a car –they’ve been watching him too- and that detail earns him at least a collective ear from the creature, aloof but carefully curious at the same time.

“I’m lookin for someone…” The driver realizes this is a horrible start, and whatever suspicions the group must have of him, they are by now warranted. “Shit!”, but he keeps going.